Before You Know Kindness (26 page)

She emerged now from the glass doors behind the receptionist’s half-moon of a desk, wearing a peasant dress that fell almost to her ankles and black sandals that looked like they were made from old tires. She was smiling, however, and Paige had to admit that the woman had a beam that was downright telegenic.

“I hear Spencer isn’t returning to work today,” she said to Randy as they wandered down the corridor to Dominique’s office. “Has something happened?”

“He wasn’t feeling well.”

“He hasn’t been feeling well since the accident.”

“He got sick in the cab.”

“Vomit sick?”

Randy nodded sympathetically.

“The flu?” she asked.

“I didn’t talk to him. Dominique did. But it didn’t sound like the flu. It sounded to Dominique like Spencer was trying to do too much too soon, and his body was rebelling. He didn’t offer to do this meeting by speakerphone, and Dominique didn’t even suggest it.”

She saw that Keenan and Dominique were already sitting at the circular table in Dominique’s office, and she guessed they’d been meeting for a few minutes already because both of their paper cups—it looked as if his had held coffee and hers had held herbal tea—were nearly empty. Dominique was curled inside a clingy black sweater dress most women Dominique’s age (even women who jogged as religiously as Dominique and worked out as strenuously with a personal trainer) would never even pull off a rack, but it seemed to work on the FERAL executive: Even at forty-something, she moved with the confidence and grace of a tiger. Keenan, she saw, was wearing the sort of pinstriped suit that the lawyers in her own office wore. If, in fact, he hadn’t been wearing those hideous plastic wing tips, he could have passed for an attorney in her own tony firm.

She took the seat beside Keenan as a lawyer-to-lawyer courtesy, and Randy sat between her and Dominique. Once they had dispensed with the pleasantries and Dominique had made it clear that she had told Spencer not even to try returning to work for the rest of the week after what he had endured that morning in the cab, Paige started pulling her notes from her briefcase (the ballistic nylon one she reserved for her meetings with FERAL, not the leather one she still preferred to use with the rest of her clients). She began by passing stapled stacks of paper a quarter inch thick to the three other people, keeping the copy well marked with her notes for herself.

“Here, essentially, is where we are on the lawsuit,” she began. “I’m still expecting we’ll be able to file in two weeks and announce the action with a press conference at my firm. I’ve also attached some very rough thoughts on the sorts of things I’ll be asking Adirondack for in the interrogatories later this fall. Obviously, I’ll want all the materials and documents that refer to the bolt and the extractor on John Seton’s model, as well as any prototypes. I’m also going to ask for gross sales, gross profit, net profit, managers’ salaries and bonuses, the contributions they make to hunting organizations and the NRA, and their expenditures for safety engineering and research. Don’t worry: If that last figure isn’t in reality paltry, we can certainly portray it that way—especially if we compare it to, say, their gross advertising expenditures.”

“Will they have to answer all that?” Randy asked.

“Oh, if a judge says so, they will,” Keenan said in his soft, slow voice. “And they’ll have to answer it all under oath.”

“Will it come to that?” the young assistant continued.

As much as she liked Keenan, Paige wanted complete control of this meeting (the truth was, she wanted complete control of all meetings), and so she quickly jumped in: “Their lawyers will object to the financial questions. And, I have to admit, some of the information is irrelevant and some will only become important if we request punitive damages. But, yes, depending upon the judge, we’ll be able to get most of it.”

“You plan on deposing Morton Knapp?” Keenan asked, referring to the Adirondack CEO, carefully uncapping a fountain pen as he spoke.

She hadn’t decided yet, but she guessed it couldn’t hurt. The CEO probably wouldn’t know much about the mechanics of the extractor on any one rifle, much less about obscure design specifications, but all those “I don’t knows” and “I wasn’t involveds” would make him look arrogant and removed, and that could only help. Besides, these days most people loathed any executive who had the letters CEO or CFO attached to his name. “Yes, definitely,” Paige heard herself saying now, as if she’d planned on deposing Knapp all along.

“I’ve also decided that Spencer must see a psychiatrist,” she went on, “and I’ve picked out two we can consider, both of whom would be very . . . sympathetic. We already have plenty of experts who can talk to the physical disability, but I want it clear that there is profound psychological trauma as well.”

“How about for the little girl?” This was Keenan again, and she nodded—nodded sincerely, this time.

“You may know this already, but the girl’s aunt is a therapist. Seton’s wife. And so she was all over that. The kid is going to see a doctor in Manhattan named Warwick. A woman. She sounded very nice.”

“You’ve spoken to her?” Randy asked. She sounded incredulous.

“Yes. I wanted to make sure we could work with her.”

Keenan smiled. “And?”

“If we can’t, we’ll simply have the girl see someone else. My sense is we don’t have a lot to worry about: The child sounds pretty disturbed by this little disaster.”

“Does all this have to happen before the press conference?” Randy wondered, flipping abstractedly through the papers Paige had handed her. It was clear she thought the task was impossible—which, if they needed it all when they filed the lawsuit and held the press conference, it was. Fortunately, they didn’t need most of it anytime soon. So far there had been very little media coverage of the accident outside of some brief stories in small newspapers in New Hampshire and Vermont. Nothing had been picked up by the majors on the wires, however, because none of the short articles from northern New England had mentioned what Spencer did for a living. Keenan’s initial fears that Leno and Letterman would make FERAL out to be either a group of morons or a group of hypocrites (or both) before the organization could put its spin on the story had so far proven unfounded. As a result, Paige was confident they still had the upper hand and were in control of how they disseminated the information.

Now she patted Randy’s wrist (Paige wasn’t precisely sure why she liked this gesture so much, but she told herself it was compassionate and theatric at once) and reassured her, “No, it doesn’t have to happen in the next two weeks. We can embarrass Adirondack quite badly with what we have already. The basic facts of this story.”

“What about the deer?” Dominique asked, and the woman ran the fingers of one hand gently over the lobe of her ear, skirting the tiny silver dolphin that dangled nearby. Her nails were long, and today they were painted a deep cardinal red. “I want to be sure we get to the deer at the press conference. Let us not forget that Spencer’s lawsuit is merely our means to the animals.”

Randy reached for a manila folder of her own. “We’ll have all sorts of surprises.”

“Such as?” Dominique said. It was obvious to Paige that this was the part that really interested the director.

“Well, for starters, hunting actually may cause wildlife overpopulation, because those buck-only laws leave six to ten does per male. If hunters were honestly concerned about keeping the herd the right size for the environment, they’d be shooting does instead of bucks. But that just doesn’t seem very macho—or
sporting
—does it? Human predators are also less likely than natural predators to kill the weakest deer—hunters want that really big rack—which over time diminishes the strength of the species. And, of course, hunting inflicts enormous stress on deer, and that limits the animals’ ability to eat and digest properly, so they don’t have the fat they need to get through a tough northern winter.”

“And the numbers? The media love a good statistic,” Dominique said.

“I do, too. Spencer taught me that. First of all, it’s clear that hunters kill a lot more deer than the records claim. For every animal that’s slaughtered, easily another one or two are only wounded and die agonizing deaths in the woods from infection, starvation or blood loss. We can also present the numbers of cows and horses and dogs and people—yes, people—killed by hunting: 191 last year. One fellow in Maine took a stray bullet in the head while watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon in his living room. Ironically, he was a hunter, too, but he stayed home that day because he’s a real Patriots fan.”

“Will we have pictures?” Dominique asked.

“Of deer or people?”

“Deer. I really don’t care about a couple hundred dead hunters.”

“Yes, we’ll have pictures of deer. We’ll have them after they’ve been shot and disemboweled, and some that were left to die in the woods and were found by people who happened to live nearby. We’ll even have a few of motherless fawns that starved to death in the snow.”

“Good. Well, not good. But helpful.”

“You bet. And I came across one more study that’s really surprising. A report by the Erie Insurance Company showed that insurance claims for car accidents involving deer are five times more common during hunting season in Pennsylvania than in the rest of the year.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, hunters claim that by thinning the herd, they’re doing drivers a favor: fewer deer, fewer car accidents. But this study says they’re actually chasing panicked animals onto highways and streets, thereby causing more accidents.” She smiled with satisfaction at the link she had found, and Dominique nodded appreciatively.

“Do we need to address the understory?” This was Keenan, and Paige instantly felt a small chill descend on the table. The understory was going to be the weak link when FERAL defended deer, because it would make the animals appear to be predators themselves. In areas where there wasn’t any hunting, especially places like Westchester and Fairfield County, the ever-increasing size of the herd was transforming the very ecosystems in which the animals lived as they devoured the plants that grew beneath the forest canopy and on which a sizable ark of smaller creatures depended. It was not uncommon for biologists to find foot-high cedars that were actually twelve and thirteen years old. Among the ramifications were fewer places for birds to nest or stop over in their migrations, as well as great ensuing swings in the numbers of insects.

Dominique, however, simply waved off Keenan’s concern. “No, we don’t. This is about hunting.”

“There are scientists who contend that the only way to keep some ecosystems from falling into complete chaos is hunting—”

“And there are scientists who turn flamethrowers on pigs so they can look at burns on live tissue. If you really believe we need to be prepared for a discussion of ecosystems, we’ll just trot out the birth control studies.”

She watched both Keenan and Randy nod patiently. They both knew that birth control only worked in places like Fire Island, worlds so small that individual deer could be tracked annually and darted with contraception. Still, this was about racket, not reality, and Dominique probably was right. And so Paige sat forward in her chair, a palpably physical need driving her to be back in the center of the conversation. “Now,” she began, “even though the point of the press conference is to announce the lawsuit—”

“And call attention to the moral horrors of hunting,” Dominique said.

“Yes, of course. But from the perspective of the lawsuit, I want to be sure that we do not reveal too much about our case or our plans. I don’t want any of Spencer’s doctors or his physical therapist talking, I don’t want a psychiatrist there if one happens to evaluate him in the next week or two, and I don’t want any ballistics experts present. The only people on the dais with me should be Dominique and Spencer. Are you okay with that, Keenan? I just don’t want three people from FERAL up there, because technically FERAL isn’t even a party to this suit.”

“Oh, I’ve spent enough time in front of cameras in my life. And I know I speak too slowly for the younger folks in broadcast. Give me a judge and a jury anytime,” Keenan said. Then: “When is the last time you heard from Adirondack?”

“Thursday of last week. They want to start talking, but I’m not interested in negotiating since we’re not interested in settling. At least not yet.”

“At least not until we know more about the gun, right?” Randy asked.

“And John Seton only got the gun back from the New Hampshire authorities on—” she glanced at a note on her pad—“the eleventh of August. And by the time we got it back from him and down to the lab, it was the fourteenth.”

“The state’s attorney made our public defender friend sweat for ten days before deciding not to press charges? Isn’t that something? That alone must have taught him a lesson,” Keenan said.

“And with people taking their summer vacations and Labor Day and the laboratory’s own backlog of work,” she continued, “they haven’t gotten to our gun. Nevertheless, they should have something for us any day now. And that’s one of the very last gaps we need to fill in before we file the suit: the concrete specifics of our theory of liability. But the fact is, even if the people in Maryland can’t find anything wrong with the extractor, there is still the issue that when you unload the magazine, a bullet remains in the chamber. It would be more difficult to win with that in front of a jury, but we could certainly threaten to make enough noise that Adirondack might say uncle. Now, I haven’t spoken to Spencer today, but you have, Dominique. I presume he still wants us to drag this out as long as possible before settling.”

Dominique took a deep breath and then said—her voice a human purr—“Spencer is ailing. I don’t honestly know for sure when he’ll be back. But I believe I can speak for him when I tell you that, yes, he wants to drag this out for as long as the media is interested.” She looked at Keenan. “You agree?”

“I do. And I also believe that he’ll stay mad at his brother-in-law for as long as needs be, and his shoulder will continue to torment him until this is behind him. And he’ll bear it all, because he is, like each of us, a true believer. I think ol’ Spencer would be more than willing to—pardon the pun—take a bullet on behalf of the deer of the great northern forest.”